The Dragon Griaule (30 page)

Chapter Two

With the death of the dragon Griaule, the city council of Teocinte were forced to confront a question they had failed to anticipate: When dealing with a creature whose heart beat once every thousand years, how does one determine whether he is actually dead? Since the sole perceptible sign of death was the closing of his eyes, it was suggested that he had merely lapsed into a coma induced by the countless gallons of poisoned paint slapped onto his side during the creation of Meric Cattanay’s mural.
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The parasites that lived on and inside him had not fled the body and there was no evidence of corruption (nor would there be for many years if the rate of decay were as glacially slow as the rest of his metabolic processes). Indeed, it had been ventured that since Griaule was a magical being, the possibility existed that his corpse would prove to be uncorrupting.

Decades before, when the council accepted Cattanay’s plan, they had acted in confidence and contracted with various entrepreneurs for the disposal of Griaule’s corpse, selling it piecemeal in advance of his death, thus adding millions to the town coffers; but the current council regretted their predecessors’ decision and
refused to honor the contracts.
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Due to their uncertainty about his mortal condition, they still feared Griaule. If he were alive, they could only imagine his reaction to an attempted dissection. Then there was the matter of aesthetics. Thanks to the discovery of mineral springs south of town and, in no small part, to Griaule himself, Teocinte had become a tourist destination. Turning a portion of the town into an abattoir, with several hundred thousand tons of dragon meat and guts and bones lying about, would be an inappropriate advertisement for fun and relaxation. The council was hesitant to act, yet the citizenry of Teocinte, who for generations had lived under Griaule’s ineffable dominion, clamored for an official judgment. It was a touchy situation, one that demanded a delicate resolution, and therefore the council tried – as do all accomplished politicians – to make doing next to nothing seem like a compromise. They tore down the scaffolding Cattanay had erected in order to create his mural, scoured the moss from the teeth, cut away the vegetation from his body, leaving in place only the thickets surrounding the ruin of Hangtown on his back (now uninhabited except for a caretaker), which they designated a historical site. They constructed rope walkways leading to every quarter of the dragon and offered tours, inducing tourists to go where most of the townspeople feared to tread. This, they thought, would promote the idea that they believed Griaule to be dead, yet would provide no evidentiary proof and put off a final determination. If Griaule were still alive and a few tourists died as a result of this experiment in the social dynamic,
well, so be it. They further built several luxury hotels, among them the Seven Weathers, on the slopes of Haver’s Roost, each offering excellent views of the dragon. And so, on the day after he found the scale, George stood at a window in his suite at the Weathers, sipping coffee and having a morning cigar, gazing at Griaule: an enormous green-and-gold lizard looming like a hill with an evil head over the smoking slum in his shadow, his tail winding off between lesser hills, light glinting from the tip of a fang and coursing along the ribbing of the sagittal crest rising from his neck, the mural on its side glazed with sun, making it indecipherable at that angle. The huge paint vats that had occupied the flat portion of his skull had been dismantled so as not to distract from the dramatic view.

The woman, Sylvia,
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stirred in the bedroom and George sat down at a writing desk and took up cleaning the scale once again, thinking he might as well make it nice for her. The dirt on the scale was peculiarly resistant and he had managed to clear only a small central patch, about a quarter of its surface, when Sylvia entered, toweling her hair, wearing only sandals and a pair of beige lounging trousers. She dropped heavily into the armchair beside the desk and sighed. He acknowledged her with a nod and bent to his task. She made an impatient noise, which he ignored; she flung her legs over the arm of the chair, the towel slipping down onto her thighs, and said blithely, ‘Well, you don’t fuck like a shopkeeper, I’ll say that much for you.’

Amused, he said, ‘I assume that’s intended as an endearment.’

‘A what-ment?’

‘Praise of a kind.’

She shrugged. ‘If that’s how you want to take it.’

‘So . . .’ He scraped at a fleck of stubborn grime with a fingernail. ‘How do shopkeepers fuck?’

‘With most of them, it’s like they’re embarrassed to be between my legs. They want to get it over quick and be gone. They turn their backs when they button their trousers. And they don’t want me saying nothing while they’re riding.’ She shook out her wet hair. ‘Not that they don’t want me making noises. They like that well enough.’

‘Then that raises the question: How do I fuck?’

‘Like a desperate man.’

‘Desperate?’ He kept on rubbing at the scale. ‘Surely not.’

‘Maybe desperate’s not the right word.’ She lazily scratched her hip. ‘It’s like you truly needed what I had to offer, and not just my tra-la-la. I could tell you wanted me to be myself and not some Sylvia.’

‘I expect I did.’ He was making good progress – the blue portion of the scale had come to resemble an aerial view of a river bordered by banks of mud and black earth. ‘From now on I’ll call you Ursula.’

‘That’s not my proper name, either.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘You don’t want to hear – it’s horrible.’ She stretched like a cat on its back in the sun; her face, turned to the window, blurred with brightness. ‘Truth be told, I don’t mind being Sylvia. Suits me, don’t you think?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

She lapsed into silence, watching him work, attentive to the occasional squeak his cloth made on the scale, and then she said, ‘Do you fancy me? I mean, the way I’m talking with you now?’

He cocked an eye toward her.

‘I’m curious is all,’ she said.

‘I have to admit you’re growing on me.’

‘I was thinking I might try being myself more often. Always having to be someone else is an awful pressure.’ She scrambled to her knees in the chair, the towel falling away completely, and leaned over the desk, peering at the scale. ‘Oh, that blue’s lovely! How long you reckon ’til it’s done?’

‘I’ll give it a polish once it’s clean. A week or so.’

She bent closer, her breasts grazing the desktop, holding her hair back from her eyes, fixed on the streak of blue dividing the
scale. How different she seemed from the brittle businesswoman he had met at Ali’s! She had tried to sustain that pose, but she let it drop more and more frequently, revealing the country girl beneath. He suspected he knew the basics of her story – a farm family with too many children; sold to a brothel keeper; earning her way by the time she was twelve – and thought knowing the specifics might uncover a deeper compatibility. But that, he reminded himself, was what she would want him to think in hopes of getting a bigger tip. Such was the beauty of whores: No matter how devious, how subtle their pretense, you always knew where you stood with them. He studied her face, prettied by concentration, and absently stroked the scale with his thumb.

A sound came to him, barely audible, part hiss, part ripping noise, as of some fundamental tissue, something huge and far away, cleaved by a cosmic sword (or else it was something near at hand, a rotten piece of cloth parting from the simple strain of being worn, giving way under a sudden stress). This sound was accompanied by a vision unlike any he had heretofore known: It was as if the objects that composed the room, the heavy mahogany furniture, the cream-colored wallpaper with its pattern of sailing vessels, the entire surround, were in fact a sea of color and form, and this sea was now rapidly withdrawing, rolling back, much as the ocean withdraws from shore prior to a tidal wave. As it receded, it revealed neither the floors and walls of adjoining rooms nor the white buildings of Teocinte, but a sun-drenched plain with tall lion-colored grasses and stands of palmetto, bordered on all sides by hills forested with pines. They were marooned in the midst of that landscape, smelling its vegetable scents, hearing the chirr and buzz of insects, touched by the soft intricacy of its breezes . . . and then it was gone, trees and plain and hills so quickly erased, they might have been a painted cloth whisked away, and the room was restored to view. George was left gaping at a portmanteau against the far wall. Sylvia, arms crossed so as to shield her breasts, squatted in the easy chair, her eyes shifting from one point to another.

‘What did you do?’ she asked in a shaky voice. She repeated the question accusingly, shrilly, as if growing certain of his complicity in the event.

‘I didn’t do anything.’ George looked down at the scale.

‘You rubbed it! I saw you!’ She wrested the scale from him and rubbed it furiously; when nothing came of her efforts she handed it back and said, ‘You try.’

It had not escaped George that there might be a correspondence between the apparition of the plain and the visions that arose when he rubbed his thumb across the face of a coin; but none of those visions had supplied the sensory detail of this last and no one else had ever seen them. He experienced some trepidation at the thought of trying it again and dropped the scale into his shirt pocket.

‘Finish dressing,’ he said. ‘Let’s go down to breakfast.’

A flash of anger ruled her face. He folded his penknife and packed up his cleaning kit and pocketed them as well.

‘Won’t you give it one more rub?’ she asked.

He ignored her.

Wrapping the towel around her upper body, she gave him a scornful look and flounced into the bedroom.

George sipped his coffee and discovered it was tepid. Through the thin fabric of his shirt, the scale felt unnaturally cold against his chest and he set it on the desk. It might be more valuable than he had presumed. He nudged it with the tip of a finger – the room remained stable.

Sylvia re-entered, still wearing the towel and still angry, though she tried to mask her anger behind a cajoling air. ‘Please! Give it one little rub.’ She kissed the nape of his neck. ‘For me?’

‘It frightened you the first time. Why are you so eager to repeat the experience?’

‘I wasn’t frightened! I was startled. You’re the one who was frightened! You should have seen your face.’

‘That begs the question: Why so eager?’

‘When Griaule makes himself known, you’d do well to pay heed or misfortune will follow.’

He leaned back, amused. ‘So you believe this nonsense about Griaule being a god.’

‘It ain’t nonsense. You’d know it for true if you lived here.’ Hands on hips, she proceeded to deliver what was obviously a quoted passage: ‘He was once mortal, long-lived yet born to
die, but Griaule has increased not only in size, but in scope. Demiurge may be too great a word to describe an overgrown lizard, yet surely he is akin to such a being. His flesh has become one with the earth. He knows its every tremor and convulsion. His thoughts roam the plenum, his mind is a cloud that encompasses our world. His blood is the marrow of time. Centuries flow through him, leaving behind a residue that he incorporates into his being. Is it any wonder he controls our lives and knows our fates?’
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‘That sounds grand, but it proves nothing. What’s it from?’

‘A book someone left at Ali’s.’

‘You don’t recall its name?’

‘Not so I could say.’

‘And yet you memorized the passage.’

‘Sometimes there’s not much to do except sit around. I get bored and I read. Sometimes I write things.’

‘What kind of things?’

‘Little stories about the other girls, like. All sorts of things.’ She caressed his cheek. ‘Try again! Please!’

With a show of patience tried that was only partly a show, expecting that nothing (or next to nothing) would occur, he picked up the scale and ran his thumb along the lustrous blue streak, pressing down hard. This time the ripping sound was louder and the transition from hotel room to sun-drenched plain instantaneous. He fell thuddingly among the tall grasses, the chair beneath him having vanished, and lay grasping the scale, squinting up at the diamond glare of the sun and a sky empty of clouds, like a sheet of blue enamel. Sylvia made a frightened noise and clutched his shoulder as he scrambled to his knees. She said something that – his mind dominated by an evolving sense of dismay – he failed to register. The smells that
had earlier seemed generic, a vague effluvia of grass and dirt, now were particularized and pungent, and the sun’s heat was no longer a gentle warmth, but an ox-roasting presence. A droplet of sweat trickled down his side from his armpit. Insects whirred past their heads and a hawk circled high above. This was no vision, he told himself. The scale had transported them somewhere, perhaps to another section of the valley. In the distance stood a ring of rolling, forested hills enclosing the lumpish shapes of lesser, nearby hills – his coach had traversed similar hills as it ascended from the coastal plain toward Teocinte, though those had been denuded of vegetation. Panic inspired him to rub at the scale, hoping to be transported back to the room; but his actions proved fruitless.

Sylvia sank to the ground and lowered her head, and this display of helplessness served to stiffen George’s spine, engaging his protective instincts. He scanned the valley for signs of life.

‘We should find shelter,’ he said dazedly. ‘And water.’

She made an indefinite noise and half-turned her head away.

‘Perhaps there’s water there.’ He pointed to the far-off hills. ‘And a village.’

‘I doubt we’ll find a village.’

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t you recognize where we are?’ She waved dejectedly at the closest hill, which lay behind them on the right. ‘There’s Haver’s Roost, where the Weathers stood. And the rise over yonder is where Griaule’s head rested. The sunken area to the left, with all the shrimp plants and cabbage palms – that’s where Morningshade used to lie. There’s Yulin Grove. It’s all there except the houses and the people.’